How an exhibition juror chooses what the public sees

The Berkeley Art Center has an annual un-juried members’ exhibition which in late 2013 brought in more than 200 entries. Former BAC director Suzanne Tan had the idea of inviting a guest juror to choose among the 200-odd submissions a handful of artists who would be invited to show larger selections of their work in a follow-up exhibition titled “Feature,” which opens Thursday (through March 2). Full disclosure: I was initially invited to be the juror but declined when it occurred to me that an interview I might do with a guest juror might be more illuminating to the art and reading public. Probably every juror works the culling process a little differently, but the public almost never has any insight into it.
Bay Area sculptor Weston Teruya was persuaded to winnow the scores of participant artists down to the few — 8, as it turned out — represented in “Feature.” Teruya and I spoke at the BAC while the full-scale members’ show was still hanging.

Q: Have you done this before?

A: I’ve sat on grant panels before but I’ve never been a solo juror and definitely it’s a whole other experience to select bodies of work from seeing just one piece by each artist. I had to do what I could to dig up other examples of their work to get a context for it. Because of the need to pull together a whole significant series of works, I had to do some additional research. I picked out maybe 40 artists from here and then looked at their CVs and statements and see what I could example of their work I could find online.

Q: You must have encountered things by artists whose work you know, right?

A: Not as many as you might think. That was the biggest surprise. There were a few people whose names were broadly familiar and a couple whose work I’d seen earlier but most of them are new to me.

Q: When you saw names you recognized or those whose work you’d seen before, did you worry about overcompensating for their familiarity by subjecting them to extra scrutiny?

A: Yes, probably, but in the initial culling of the larger list, that just became one of the many factors.

Q: If I’d been jurying this show, I’d have preferred not to see labels, or artists’ names. Did their presence matter to you?

A: Where the labels helped was in giving titles that sometimes hinted at deeper investigations. For example one of the artists here is one of those I sort of passed by it but on a second look, this title and the medium also “Photograph Considered as a Imprint, an Analog and a Facsimile” (a Van Dyke print from a hand-drawn negative) by Toni Gentilli.

Q: Will this specific piece appear again in the next show?

A: I think we are going to include the first-round pieces.

Q: Are the artists choosing the work they’re going to show or are you choosing it?

A: A little bit of both. They’re presenting images of an array of work that we’re then going to select from.

Q: Will you have a chance to look at the work eyes-on?

A: I will be working from images, but I’m sure if there are questions that can only be answered by the real objects, there’ll be some dropping off of things to see firsthand.

Q: Will you hang the show?

A: I will at least help lay out the show.

Q: Was that your understanding coming in?

A: I believe we talked about it a little bit. I think it’s important for someone curating a show to be involved in that too.

Q: Do you feel obliged to suppress your own taste to be a juror, looking at this many things?

A: I don’t know if I suppress my own taste but I do try to keep an open mind to a range of different kinds of work and intentions and try to get a spread of materials as well. Even when I was looking further into work I wanted to see more of I was looking for things that had a kind of craft and thoughtful intention, whatever forms those took. it might be something intricately done or something much more loose or conceptually driven.

Q: Thinking of what you make, what was the work with which you felt most affinity when you saw it?

A: I can see the reasons why the work that I chose is what it is. For example, even though Toni’s work is not related to mine in any direct sense, but there’s something about the nature of her exploration that resonates with me. And with both Leigh (Wells) and Marcela (Florez), they’re working with drawing and paper and, working with paper myself, I feel some affinity with them. But they’re also going in different directions and have different intentions… With Pallavi (Sharma), her work is formally the most different from my own, but there’s something about the content and the issues she’s interested in that is something I feel some affinity for in the other research and writing that I’ve done. So there are ways in which she connects not so much with my work but with my broader interests.

Q: Did you wish at any point that there were fewer than 8 you could have chosen?

A: We talked about “around 8,” so if I’d chosen fewer, I don’t think they would have objected, but 8 just seemed a good number to work with. Getting it down to that was much trickier than I thought.

Q: It strikes me generally that sculpture is not a strength of the Bay Area art scene, and it’s definitely in the minority here. Were you surprised by the low ratio here of free-standing sculpture to work on the wall?

A: I don’t know that I was surprised. Maybe a little disappointed, given my interest in sculpture…

Q: Were you up against a deadline in this process? Did you find that made it easier, more difficult?

A: It was fine because once I got a sense of what work I was drawn to, it was really a matter of getting a sense of people’s practices. So when I came back, it was really about getting it down to 14 or so and from there condensing to 8.

Q: Let’s say that all the work that impressed you had been photography. Would you have been willing, or ruthless enough, to do a show of 5 or 8 photographers? Or would you have felt that that was unfair to every other practice represented here?

A: I think trying to get some disciplinary spread was important. You can see from looking around that there’s a pretty strong representation of abstract painting, and I think an argument could be made to just focus it in that direction. But I felt that would be representative of the work in the invitational show or of the broader fact of having this show in Berkeley or in the region…

Q: What were some of abstract paintings did catch your eye?

A: Three of the pieces I was interested in but that ultimately weren’t selected were by Kimberly Rowe, Klari Reis and Ruth Freeman. They’re all interesting painters, so I am a little sad that I wasn’t able to include their work…

Q: Was that a matter of other things you saw here impressing you more, or was it a matter of balancing the character of the overall show that you saw forming?

A: I think it was more about balance, about what would ultimately fit together as a show in the end, which is not to say there’s an obvious theme tying things throughout.

Q: Suppose nobody gets it? Does that really matter to you whether the thinking that emerges from assembling the final 8 goes over people’s heads?

A: If people don’t get my intentions, I think that’s fine for the kind of show it is, because what I want most is for people to appreciate the work of the artists in it. How best to showcase the work they present is really my priority. If people see interesting relationships among them emerging, so much the better.